Some Diversions of a Man of Letters. Edmund Gosse

social satire to the playwright:—

      "Let the nice well-bred beau himself perceive

       The most accomplished, useless thing alive;

       Expose the bottle-sparks that range the town—

       Shaming themselves with follies not their own—

       But chief these foes to virgin innocence,

       Who, while they make to honour vain pretence,

       With all that's base and impious can dispense."

      Honour to those who aim high and execute boldly!

      "If Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire,

       The animated scene throughout inspire;

       If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest,

       Each sees his darling folly made a jest;

       If Garth's and Dryden's genius, through each line,

       In artful praise and well-turn'd satire shine—

       To us ascribe the immortal sacred flame."

      In this dead period of the stage Catharine Trotter found a warm friend and doubtless an efficient patron in a Lady Piers, of whom we should be glad to know more. Sir George Piers, the husband of this lady, was an officer of rank under the Duke of Marlborough, later to become useful to Catharine Trotter. Meanwhile the latter returned to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where, in 1701, under the patronage of Lord Halifax—Pope's "Bufo"—she produced her third tragedy, The Unhappy Penitent. The dedication of this play to Halifax is a long and interesting essay on the poetry of the age. The author passes Dryden, Otway, Congreve, and Lee under examination, and finds technical blemishes in them all:—

      "The inimitable Shakespeare seems alone secure on every side from an attack. I speak not here of faults against the rules of poetry, but against the natural Genius. He had all the images of nature present to him, studied her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her various features, for though he has chiefly exerted himself on the more masculine passions, 'tis as the choice of his judgment, not the restraint of his genius, and he has given us as a proof he could be every way equally admirable."

      Lady Piers wrote the prologue to The Unhappy Penitent in verses better turned than might have been expected. She did not stint praise to her young friend, whom she compares to the rising sun:—

      "Like him, bright Maid, Thy great perfections shine

       As awful, as resplendent, as divine! …

       Minerva and Diana guard your soul!"

      The Unhappy Penitent is not a pleasing performance: it is amorous and violent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory was better than her practice. Nevertheless, it seems to have been successful, for the author some time afterwards, speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas, remarks that "the taste is mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only public section of Catharine Trotter's career was now over, and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of twenty-two, to more elevated studies.

      When Love at a Loss was published the author had already left town, and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent she now settled at Salisbury, at the house of a physician, Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister. Her growing intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have had something to do with her determination to make this city her home. She formed a very enthusiastic friendship with the Bishop's second lady, who was an active theologian and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess was fascinated by Mrs. Burnet. "I have not met," she writes in 1701, "such perfection in any of our sex." She now visited in the best Wiltshire society. When the famous singer, John Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave a concert at the palace, and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that she rode out after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at Lord Arundell of Wardour's house. She had a great appreciation of the Bishop's "volatile activity." It is now that the name of Locke first occurs in her correspondence, and we gather that she came into some personal contact with him through a member of the Bishop's family—George Burnet of Kemney, in Aberdeenshire—probably a cousin, with whom she now cultivated an ardent intellectual friendship. He left England on a mission which occupied him from the middle of 1701 until 1708, and this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented their acquaintance from ripening into a warmer feeling. The romance and tragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather, it is plain, around this George Burnet, who was a man of brilliant accomplishments and interested, like herself, in philosophical studies.

      These, it would appear, Catharine Trotter had never abandoned, but she applied herself to them closely at Salisbury, where she made some superior acquaintances. One of these was John Norris of Bemerton, whose Theory of an Ideal and Intelligible World had just made some sensation. By the intermediary of George Burnet she came in touch with some of the leading French writers of the moment, such as Malebranche and Madame Dacier. There is a French poet, unnamed, who understands English, but he is gone to Rome before he can be made to read The Fatal Friendship. Meanwhile, Catharine Trotter's obsession with the ideas of Locke was giving some anxiety to her friends. That philosopher had published his famous Essay on the Human Understanding in 1690, and it had taken several years for the opposition to his views, and in particular to his theological toleration, to take effect. But in 1697 there were made a number of almost simultaneous attacks on Locke's position. The circle at Salisbury was involved in them, for one of these was written by Norris of Bemerton, and another is attributed to a member of the Burnet family. Catharine Trotter, who had studied Locke's later works with enthusiastic approval, was scandalised by the attacks, and sat down to refute them. This must have been in 1701.

      Although the intellectual society of Salisbury was prominent in taking the conservative view of Locke, our bluestocking could not refrain from telling Mrs. Burnet what she had done, nor from showing her treatise to that friend under vows of confidence. But Mrs. Burnet, who was impulsive and generous, could not keep the secret; she spoke about it to the Bishop, and then to Norris of Bemerton, and finally (in June 1702) to Locke himself. Locke was at Oates, confined by his asthma; he was old and suffering, but still full of benevolence and curiosity, and he was graciously interested in his remarkable defender at Salisbury. As he could not himself travel, he sent his adopted son to call on Catharine Trotter, with a present of books; this was Peter King, still a young man, but already M.P. for Beer Alston, and later to become Lord Chancellor and the first Lord King of Ockham. George Burnet, writing from Paris, had been very insistent that Catharine should not publish her treatise, but she overruled his objections, and her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding appeared anonymously in May 1702. People were wonderfully polite in those days, and Locke himself wrote to his "protectress" a charming letter in which he told her that her "Defence was the greatest honour my Essay could have procured me."

      She sent her Defence to Leibnitz, who criticised it at considerable length:—[3]

      "J'ai lu livre de Mlle. Trotter. Dans la dedicace elle exhorte M. Locke à donner des démonstrations de morale. Je crois qu'il aurait eu de la peine à y reussir. L'art de démontrer n'est pas son fait. Je tiens que nous nous appercevons sans raisonnement de ce qui est juste et injuste, comme nous nous appercevons sans raison de quelques theoremes de Geometrie; mais il est tousjours bon de venir à la démonstration. Justice et injustice ne dependent seulement de la nature humaine, mais de la nature de la substance intelligente en général; et Mlle. Trotter remarque fort bien qu'elle vient de la nature de Dieu et n'est point arbitraire. La nature de Dieu est tousjours fondée en raison."

      Notwithstanding all this, the commentators of Locke appear, without exception, to ignore the Defence, and it was probably never much read outside the cultivated Salisbury circle.

      In this year, 1702, the health of Catharine Trotter began to give her uneasiness, and it was for this reason that she left Salisbury